Nearly 2,24,301 individuals have been vaccinated so far, with about 17,000 of them vaccinated on Sunday, the Health Ministry said in a briefing. With 3,000 vaccination sites and a capacity of 100 persons per site, the Centre had planned to vaccinate 300,000 persons nationally on Saturday. Consolidated figures on Sunday show that about 207,000 — or about seven in ten — were inoculated on the inaugural day.
Of all those vaccinated so far, 447 reported reactions such as pain, mild swelling, mild fever or nausea, with only three persons requiring hospitalisation. The drop in hospitalisations compared to the inaugural day on Saturday was because of it being Sunday with only six States — Arunachal Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Manipur and Tamil Nadu — conducting vaccinations.
The Health Ministry has advised States to conduct vaccination sessions on only four days every week to minimise disruption to routine health services.
Sunday’s briefing was conducted by Dr. Manohar Agnani, Additional Secretary (Health), with no follow-up questions by journalists taken up.
India plans to inoculate 3 crore health workers, municipal workers, sanitation workers, and later on, 27 crore of those most vulnerable to the disease by July. The Health Ministry claimed that the nearly 200,000 vaccinations undertaken on Saturday were the highest “day 1” numbers anywhere in the world, and exceeded that of the United States, France and the United Kingdom on their first days of vaccination.
However, the Ministry did not share numbers on how many of those who were supposed to be inoculated on Saturday and Sunday actually turned up for their shots. Nor was information shared on how many doses Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin, being dispensed in clinical trial mode, and Serum Institute of India’s Covishield, were dispensed. The government has announced that it has stocks of 11 million doses of Covishield and 5.5 million doses of Covaxin.
So far, health workers don’t have a choice in the vaccine being administered, with 12 States in receipt of Covaxin. Because the vaccine has to be administered again after a gap of 28 days, each site is expected to administer the same kind of vaccine.